Life of Pi (2012)

Life of Pi Synopsis

Director Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) creates a groundbreaking movie event about a young man who survives a tragic disaster at sea and is hurtled into an epic journey of adventure and discovery. While marooned on a lifeboat, he forms an amazing and unexpected connection with the ship's only other survivor -- a fearsome Bengal tiger.

"Life of Whoopie Pie" is a story of an unlikely friendship and incredible survival. A boy named Whoopie Pie is stranded in the middle of the ocean in a boat made of chocolate chip cookies. As if this situation weren't harrowing enough, he's not alone on the boat. He shares it with a ravenous beast: Cookie Monster! Can Cookie control himself so he doesn't eat their boat right out from under them?

In an extended feature that will be printed in the December 6th issue of the magazine, the trade has gone into extreme detail about some serious and upsetting malfeasance that has been going on behind the scenes of major blockbuster films over the last few years, resulting in many animal deaths due to carelessness and cover-ups.

Have we lost another great director to 3D experimentation? James Cameron seems to really only be making Avatar sequels so he can play with the 3D cameras he invented, and now Ang Lee is riding his Life of Pi success to another 3D effort, which seems to be less about the storytelling than the effects

This actually isn't the first time that Fox has tried to launch a theme park of their own. In 1999 the studio opened the doomed Fox Studios Backlot in Australia, but the idea wound up flopping and the park closed two years after it opened. The Genting Outdoor Theme Park that currently exists will begin the upgrade process in September...

In retrospect, last year was an absolutely amazing year for genre films. Both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises exploded at the box office; The Hunger Games birthed a new beloved big screen sci-fi franchise, Skyfall ended up being one of the best James Bond movies in the history of the series...

Tracy Lee Stum is kind of a badass. The 3D-chalk artist has been creating temporary street art for years, but this time around she has been commissioned by the Life of Pi crew to create art to raise awareness for Ang Lee’s film’s Blu-ray and DVD release.

This week’s Oscar-winning release, Life of Pi has sort-of been overshadowed by a bunch of re-releases from companies as varied as Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount. There should be a little something out there for everyone this week. Read on to learn about some of this week’s best releases, and maybe even a few that slipped under your radar.

Far from the cameras that were trained on starlets and their gowns, more than 400 visual effects artists were protesting the awards. When Life of Pi won for Best Visual Effects, winner Bill Westenhofer attempted to bring attention to the fact that his company is facing bankruptcy… and was cut off by the theme from Jaws

Technicians who contributed to Ang Lee’s Life of Pi gathered outside the Dolby theater in Hollywood. The protest was organized after the popular Rhythm & Hues effects house filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy shortly after winning a BAFTA award for the work they did on Lee’s mystical film.

The biggest night in Hollywood is over, and now we've got another year in movies remembered with a whole bunch of big gold trophies. Argo was the big winner of the night, taking home Best Picture in addition to Best Adapted Screenplay and Film Editing, but there were plenty of statues to go around

It's famously difficult to get a sci-fi or fantasy film any major Oscar nominations, with the Lord of the Rings trilogy standing out as the one massive exception. But that's where the Saturn Awards can come in. The awards handed out by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, the Saturns find a way to honor the best in genre every year, and this year they've produced a list of nominees with a huge range

Life of Pi is an absolutely breathtaking movie. I won't pretend otherwise. When I saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall, I wholeheartedly believed it was a serious contender for the Academy Awards' most prestigious honor of Best Picture. And yet when the Oscars were finally announced, I had no enthusiasm for Life of Pi's nomination. Worse yet, I realized I'd be angry if it actually won.

It’s that time of year when Oscar talk is everywhere. For some releases, the Oscars present an opportunity to slap a bunch of “winner” stickers or notes on a Blu-ray or DVD box, which is why the months following the awards often feature some of the home releases of the previous year’s best films. Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, Life of Pi very much falls into this category and will be hitting 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD on March 12.

Individual guilds often help paint the picture of which films are going to emerge triumphant on Oscar night. Case in point, the movie that takes home the top award at the 63rd Annual ACE Eddie Awards honoring achievements in editing likely have to be considered the frontrunner for the Academy Awards.

Now that the year's Best Picture Oscar nominees have been announced, we've got a long six weeks to go before the awards ceremony-- which means, of course, that it's time to start making fun of the nominees. Some of them are familiar to everyone, like Django Unchained and Argo, but plenty of people only heard of Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Skyfall may be seen by some as just another silly blockbuster action movie, but the truth is that it really was one of the most beautiful films to be released in 2012, the Shanghai sequence alone deserving tons of recognition. But do you think that he deserves the top prize from the ASC?

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts, aka BAFTA, is roughly the British equivalent of the Academy Awards, honoring the best in English-language film with a slight bend toward homegrown product. The group announced their award nominations today, just one day before the Academy Award nominations go out

These past couple of weeks hundreds if not thousands of film critics have worked to try and put together their top 10 lists for 2012, determining which titles, above all the rest, stood out over the last 12 months. These personal lists are great because they really help audiences understand critics' individual tastes, and it's also a great way to discover movies that otherwise may have been missed.

The following ten movies are the ones that have really stuck with me. They’re the ones that have gotten better with months or weeks of age and have separated themselves from the pack. Some of them will definitely be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and others will not even be considered. Some of them you’ll probably agree with, and some of them will probably make you laugh and doubt my credibility.

Is this going to be the best Thanksgiving ever? Well if we're talking about your family, that's pretty much already been determined-- either you guys got in a blow-out fight over the right way to carve the turkey, or you had a merry and wine-fueled dinner that ended with naps on the couch for everyone. But if we're talking about Hollywood and the box office, it might still be happening

The movie works because it takes all of the visions readers have created in their heads while reading Life and Pi and makes those visions bigger, bolder, and brighter. It works because it streamlines a lengthy tale without making us feel as we are missing anything key to the narrative. As a film, Life of Pi is a visual masterpiece, but isn’t better than the book.

Life of Pi is being sold as this year's Avatar, the 3D movie explosion that must be seen on the big screen, that must be seen more than once, and that must be considered the holiday moviegoing event for the entire family. That's a whole lot of pressure, but with director Ang Lee behind it and a lot of critical raves

Luckily there's one solution out there for all of us, every year: the movies! Hollywood, a place that understands better than anyone how your family can make you nuts, obliges us every year by releasing a whole ton of movies around the holiday, at least one of which is bound to appeal to everybody. And while there are a few films you can take almost anyone to and guarantee a success

This week on Operation Kino, we're only got each other, a lifeboat, and this giant Bengal tiger, as we review Ang Lee's Life of Pi. From there we talk about the dilemma on the minds of many movie fans this week, as we attempt to take our families and loved ones to the movies and toe the line between picking movies everyone will like and actually trying to seek out the good stuff

If your Thanksgiving is going anything like mine, you're realizing with a mix of excitement and dread that the movie year is almost over, and there's a lot left to catch up on. Without even digging into movies that are on DVD, there are a ton of films out in theaters right now or on VOD that at least deserve awards consideration

This time of year you're probably overwhelmed figuring out your holiday plans and making a list of everyone you need to give presents, but there's another list you probably have in mind as a movie buff: the Oscar nominations. No, the nominees won't be announced until January 10, but now is the time to start catching up on the names that will probably be read that day

We are headed into the greatest holiday ever created by anyone ever. Black Friday. I can’t wait. There’s a 103” Beovision 4 on sale for $3 at Best Buy that’s got my name written all over it. But until then we’ve got Tigers, Wolverines and Guardians

For the Thanksgiving holiday, we looked to Life Of Pi, Hitchcock, & Silver Linings Playbook for inspiration, and so have provided a selection of fantastical tales, scandalous showbiz stories, and loony love yarns for your home viewing entertainment.

Earlier this year I had the chance to trek down to Las Vegas for the annual CinemaCon convention and while attending the 20th Century Fox presentation I got to see some pretty amazing stuff from Life of Pi. One of those scenes involved the pain character, Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) simultaneous battling a school of flying fish as well as a stowaway tiger on his lifeboat.

Last Friday I lined up two hours early, with an early autumn rainstorm crashing down, to catch the New York Film Festival press screening of Life of Pi, because the festival has exactly one press screening for all of their films, and there was no way I was going to miss that one. Even on the surface the movie seemed to tick all the boxes of Oscar season

Like Scorsese did with Hugo, Lee uses Pi's simple story to spin off in bold visual directions, balancing on the razor's edge between fantasy and outright surrealism that provides some of the most gripping and gorgeous images on screen this year. And it's not all just glittery poetry like seen in the image above

Ang Lee’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi opens the New York Film Festival later this week, meaning that Fox has just a few days left to ramp up its promotional campaign to capitalize on the exposure of a splashy film-fest premiere, setting the stage for the film’s eventual November 21 release date.

Thankfully, Ang Lee’s anticipated Life of Pi isn’t only going to be the story of a boy trapped on a raft with a tiger - not that it wouldn’t make for a compelling cinematic challenge for the director. I mean, how do you make that story interesting for the bulk of a movie’s run time? But the latest trailer for the film suggests more scope to the narrative, and the presence of Irrfan Khan, which always makes a movie better.

Studios are always concerned that their movies won't have enough star power to attract big audiences, but apparently the opposite is true in the case of Ang Lee's Life of Pi. While Tobey Maguire was previously cast as author Yann Martel in the upcoming adaptation, apparently it's been decided that Maguire is too well known and he has been cut out of the film and the character has been recast.

Last week we learned that Robert Zemeckis' Flight will be the final film of this year's New York Film Festival, and today we have learned the title that will be kicking the whole thing off. It has been announced by the Film Society and Lincoln Center that Ang Lee's Life of Pi will be opening this year's festival, which also happens to the 50th anniversary of the event.

Based on the Man Booker Prize winning, not to mention best-selling, novel by Yann Martel, Ang Lee's Life of Pi finally has a full trailer. The film from the Academy Award winning director hits theaters in less than four months so it's about time that more than just the Cinema-Con attendees got a look at the highly anticipated literary adaptation. And, as described, it is absolutely gorgeous.

Yann Martel's Life of Pi was one of the ubiquitous reads of the early 2000s. But as much of a bookworm as I am, no amount of friends' urgings and passionate recommendations could get me past its peculiar premise: a boy and a 450 pound tiger trapped on a lifeboat together for 227 days. I just couldn't imagine a story there, but the latest images from Ang Lee's upcoming adaptation have piqued my interest...

If ever there's a story that could benefit from proper use of 3D technology, it's the big screen adaptation of Yann Martel's adventure novel Life of Pi. Martel paints a vivid, colorful picture in the telling of Pi's story, which offers real potential for a visually stunning feature film. Factor in Ang Lee's involvement as director, and Life of Pi may just be one of the must-see-in-3D movies this year.

Fox announced it will potentially dodge all of the Oscar-friendly films that are piling on top of each other for a Christmas Day release by moving Ang Lee’s Life of Pi from Dec. 21 to Nov. 21. Great move. Shifting Pi to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend gives it room to breathe, which it needs.

Just yesterday the first official image for Ang Lee’s The Life of Pi came online. The picture featured a Indian teenager with a turban standing on one end of a lifeboat, with a roaring Bengal tiger on the other. For those that haven’t read Yann Martel’s novel, or are at least not familiar with the story, it could have been perceived as a very odd still. Luckily, I’ve just come back from watching the first footage from the film and I’m happy to explain what it’s all about.

There are a lot of unrealistic and surreal things happening in that shot, from the size of the tiger to the stark cleanliness of the boat to even the serene colors of the sky. This picture still gives no indication of how Lee will be telling the story, but the look is intriguing

Heigh Ho Silver, away! Ride like the wind to Dec., 21 2012, which is when Walt Disney intends to open Jerry Bruckheimer’s big-budget reboot of The Lone Ranger.Armie Hammer, last seen playing twins in David Fincher’s The Social Network

For whatever reason Life of Pi will be shot in 3D, and it's set for a December 14 release this year. WIth the Sundance comedy The Details coming later this year, and the Baz Luhrmann-directed Great Gatsby still on the horizon, Maguire will be fairly busy in the coming months

Unless he was dead set on casting Dev Patel, Ang Lee pretty much had no choice but to go with an unknown when finding a lead actor for Life of Pi, his adaptation of Yann Martel's novel about an Indian boy stuck

$70 million honestly already sounds kind of low for a project this elaborate, but given that it's the kind of literary adaptation that almost never makes any money, it's probably even more than the studio can afford

Ang Lee will adapt Yann Martel's best seller "Life of Pi," though he has yet to bang out all of the details about the project. The book follows a young Indian boy named Piscine who, while sailing to Canada with his zookeeper father